Editorial:Prepare Better

The monsoon officially arrived in Sikkim on Wednesday, and even as the Met office was registering its arrival, the vicious calling card of the rains was delivered with a flash flood in remote East Sikkim which claimed seven lives in Rolep as dawn broke on Thursday. A few days before this mishap, a flash flood tore through Lachung [on 03 June] at the other end of Sikkim, but because this one happened in the afternoon, the warning signs were noticed in time and although property was damaged, no lives were lost. There was no such providential escape for Rolep, where the flashflood struck too early in the morning for any precautions to be possible.
One does not normally associate floods with the hills, but flash-floods are common here and are caused essentially by three reasons – a Glacial Lake Outburst Flood, a cloudburst or the breaking of a natural dam. Information trickling in from Rolep suggests that the first two causes don’t apply in its case. The residents are convinced that the flash-flood resulted when a natural dam caused by a landslide upstream burst on Thursday morning. If this was indeed the case, the disaster preparedness plans of Sikkim need to be revised. GLOFs can justifiably catch people off guard because glaciers are extremely remote in Sikkim and national security paranoia has kept them out of bounds for locals and experts alike and a cloudburst is nature at its most fearsome offering no response time. A flash-flood generated by natural dam [and its eventual collapse], is however something which at least allows time for evacuation, if not remedy, in time. It is kind of like a Tsunami in that just as before a Tsunami, the sea retreats, so in the case of a natural dam burst, the jhora or stream in question will be discharging much lower volumes of water than the precipitation coming down. Hill folk have traditionally recognised this warning sign and move away from water courses when the volume of water in the jhora/ stream is not proportional to the amount of rain being received. The connection with the land is no longer as organic as is required for safety in these parts and too many warning signs are lost to ignorance, disinterest, and as could have been in Rolep’s case, timing. Details of the incident are still not very clear since the village is still grappling with the shock of fatalities, but it is possible that natural dam was created at night and the overnight inundation so heavy that it broke earlier than is normal.
One will probably never know what really triggered the Rolep flash-flood, but it is important that the lesson is learnt well. To begin with, disaster management plans, which, as per claims, have been drafted for all parts of Sikkim, need to be reviewed for their efficacy and to verify whether they are customised to location-specific threats or are the usual cut-and-paste jobs of token do’s and don’ts. It is important that disaster management plans are nuanced with traditional knowledge on how the jhoras and hill slopes of each area behave, take into consideration the history of slides and remind people of the warning signs and how to respond to them. Even meteorological data needs to be updated on real-time basis [at least during monsoons], and this, if checked against land stability projections [easily produced by the Mines & Geology Department if supported with the right amount of funding], can provide those crucial minutes of advance warning which could save lives, if not property. Such a mechanism would have been worth every lakh spent on its creation in Rolep’s case [if it was caused by a cloud-burst or extremely heavy rainfall as is also being speculated]. Funds in a post-earthquake scenario to install such an advance warning system should not be difficult to source, but more important for such an undertaking will be an earnest approach and dedicated follow-up, but the results will be definitely be rewarding...